News and Updates

1. I’ve been working on a post on the subversives currently gathered together in Congress under the GOP banner, but it’s not going well.  Mostly, I suspect, because every time I sit down to work on it I just get so blisteringly angry that such aggressively ignorant specimens are not only serving in our nation’s once-proud legislature but are actually likely to be re-elected to the same by the ideological bubble-dwellers they have gerrymandered into their districts that I lose focus and end up ranting at the walls, mostly silently when others are home but not always.  And not good ranting either, the kind you can just write down and have a decent post.  This is incoherent ranting, the kind that, ironically enough, one often hears from these selfsame Congressional urchins.  Sad as it is to admit they have brought me down to their level, and I may never finish that post.  It’s a shame, really.  It starts with Edmond Genet and ends with the foreign minister of Iran having to take time out of his day to explain to those Republicans exactly how our Constitution actually works, which is a depressing thing to see as an American.  It had potential.  Maybe someday.

2. We are down to four turkey chicks now.  This is what happens when you breed animals for meat and not survival instinct – you end up with things that are literally too stupid to eat.  The first one went last Thursday.  He was bumping around blindly in the bin, so Lauren and I went to the pharmacy to get some glucose tablets to make into a liquid for him, but by the time we got home he was gone.  We had a nice little burial out in the back yard.  The second one followed shortly thereafter along much the same trajectory, though Lauren did spend a couple of hopeful days squirting glucose down his throat beforehand.  That burial was Sunday.  So far the others seem to be surviving.

3. I will admit that I have a certain sympathy for those birds this week, now that I am getting over my stomach bug.  I wasn’t all that interested in eating either, really.

4. Kim and I have decided that any sports team that is called the “Magicians” should require its coaches to wear top hats.

5. I am not entirely sure why I should care that Jeremy Clarkson has been behaving like an ass on the set of Top Gear.  It is abundantly clear to anyone watching that he is an ass of long standing and that this is in fact the main focus of his appeal.  That’s why you watch him.  I think they should just fine him for being more of an ass than usual and get on with the show.

6. I have filled out my March Madness bracket.  They go so quickly when you have no actual clue what you’re doing.  Oddly enough I ended up with two local schools from different eras of my life in the championship game.  There is no conceivable way this could be due to familiarity, wishful thinking, or general laziness on my part. 

7. I am so far behind in my grading that I may have lapped myself.

8. Today we started covering WWII in my classes at Mid-Range Campus.  WWII is the gateway drug of American history – it’s the thing that sucks people in and gets them interested in the rest of it.  At least that’s how it worked for me.  The first serious work of historical scholarship I ever read was a 500pp history of US naval operations in the WWII.  I was twelve.  It is not an accident that I ended up in my current career field.

9. Every once in a while I like to throw the phrase “Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries)” into this blog just to entice the folks monitoring social media for him to come and visit.  Hi guys!

10. Now and then my students remind me why I do what I do.  Those are good days.